OPOSING ABORTION ISN'T A MODERN CHRISTIAN FAD

Douglas Farrow. National Post , 4 July 2008

In “Who's ready to return their snowflake” (July 4), Colby Cosh poses a serious question.  It is unfortunate that, in doing so, he indulges his own cynicism with a series of non sequiturs and frivolous asides.  It is still more unfortunate that he also misleads his readers with a glaring historical falsehood, namely, “the idea that abortion is morally equivalent to murder is just as absent from the history of the world before the 1960s as is the bold, proud above-board abortionist.”

 
At the end of my own article on the subject (“Henry Morgentaler's Canada is not my Canada”, 29 June) I quoted the late Justice Louis-Philippe de Grandpré as follows: “Abortion at any stage of pregnancy is murder, and any attack against the fetus is a crime. To kill a fetus is murder.” Even the briefest research would have shown Mr Cosh that this thinking has been characteristic of Christians for two millennia.

I can offer him a good many examples, but just a single example will suffice here, drawn from Athenagorus, who is defending second-century Christians against one of many scurrilous attacks against them:  “What man of sound mind, therefore, will affirm, while such is our character, that we are murderers? . . . [W]hen we say that those women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion, on what principle should we commit murder?  For it does not belong to the same person to regard the very fetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God's care, and when it has passed into life, to kill it; and not to expose an infant, because those who expose them are chargeable with child-murder, and on the other hand, when it has been reared to destroy it.” ( A Plea for the Christians § 35)

The simple fact is that Christianity introduced into western civilization a profound new respect for the dignity of human life, and in particular for the vulnerable children which Mr Cosh's “bold, proud, above-board abortionist” boasts that he has killed by the thousands.  But corrections of historical fact will not answer fully to Cosh's cynicism. He echoes a question I also asked, respecting the willingness of Christians today, and of others who oppose abortion as a matter of serious moral principle, to sacrifice honours (dubious or otherwise) and whatever else is necessary for the sake of that principle.  I am grateful to those who have, and I hope and pray that the rest of us are up to the challenge.

Douglas Farrow is associate professor at McGill University in Montreal.

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